Early in 1856 Lyell advised me to write out my views fully and I began at once to do so on a scale three or four times as extensive as that which was afterward followed in my Origin of Species.
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Time: 1859
Place: England
Early in 1856 Lyell advised me to write out my views fully and I began at once to do so on a scale three or four times as extensive as that which was afterward followed in my Origin of Species; yet it was only an abstract of the materials which I had collected and I got through about half the work on this scale. But my plans were overthrown, for early in the summer of 1858 Alfred Russel Wallace, who was then in the Malay Archipelago, sent me an essay On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type and this essay contained exactly the same theory as mine. Mr. Wallace expressed the wish that if I thought well of his essay, I should send it to Lyell for perusal.
The circumstances under which I consented, at the request of Lyell and Hooker, to allow of an abstract from my manuscript, together with a letter to Asa Gray, dated September 5, 1857, to be published at the same time with Wallace’s essay, are given in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, 1858. I was at first very unwilling to consent, as I thought Mr. Wallace might consider my doing so unjustifiable, for I did not then know how generous and noble was his disposition. Neither the extract from my manuscript nor the letter to Gray had been intended for publication and they were badly written. Mr. Wallace’s essay, on the other hand, was admirably expressed and quite clear. Nevertheless, our joint productions excited very little attention and the only published notice of them which I can remember was by Professor Haughton, of Dublin, whose verdict was that all that was new in them was false and what was true was old. This shows how necessary it is that any new view should be explained at considerable length in order to arouse public attention.
In September, 1858, I set to work by the strong advice of Lyell and Hooker to prepare a volume on the transmutation of species but was often interrupted by ill-health and short visits to Doctor Lane’s delightful hydropathic establishment at Moor Park. I abstracted the manuscript begun on a much larger scale in 1856 and completed the volume on the same reduced scale. It cost me thirteen months and ten days’ hard labor. It was published under the title of the Origin of Species, in November, 1859. Though considerably added to and corrected in the later editions, it has remained substantially the same book.
It is no doubt the chief work of my life. It was from the first highly successful. The first small edition of twelve hundred fifty copies was sold on the day of publication and a second edition of three thousand copies soon afterward. Sixteen thousand copies have now (1876) been sold in England; and considering how stiff a book it is, this is a large number. It has been translated into almost every European tongue, even into such languages as Spanish, Bohemian, Polish and Russian. It has also, according to Miss Bird, been translated into Japanese and is much studied in that country. Even an essay on it has appeared in Hebrew, showing that the theory is contained in the Old Testament! The reviews were very numerous; for some time I collected all that appeared on the Origin and on my related books and these amount (excluding newspaper reviews) to two hundred sixty-five; but after a time I gave up the attempt in despair. Many separate essays and books on the subject have appeared; and in Germany a catalogue or bibliography, on “Darwinismus” has appeared every year or two.
The success of the Origin may, I think, be attributed in large part to my having long before written two condensed sketches and to my having finally abstracted a much larger manuscript, which was itself an abstract. By this means I was enabled to select the more striking facts and conclusions. I had also during many years followed a golden rule, namely, whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought, came across me which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.
It has sometimes been said that the success of the Origin proved “that the subject was in the air,” or “that men’s minds were prepared for it.” I do not think that this is strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species. Even Lyell and Hooker, though they would listen with interest to me, never seemed to agree. I tried once or twice to explain to able men what I meant by “natural selection,” but signally failed. What I believe was strictly true is that innumerable well-observed facts were stored in the minds of naturalists ready to take their proper places as soon as any theory that would receive them was sufficiently explained. Another element in the success of the book was its moderate size; and this I owe to the appearance of Mr. Wallace’s essay; had I published on the scale in which I began to write in 1856, the book would have been four or five times as large as the Origin and very few would have had the patience to read it.
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